Asia
Three reasons why DeepSeek's new model matters
The long-awaited V4 is more efficient and a win for Chinese chipmakers. On Friday, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek released a preview of V4, its long-awaited new flagship model. Notably, the model can process much longer prompts than its last generation, thanks to a new design that helps it handle large amounts of text more efficiently. Like DeepSeek's previous models, V4 is open source, meaning it is available for anyone to download, use, and modify. V4 marks DeepSeek's most significant release since R1, the reasoning model it launched in January 2025. R1, which was trained on limited computing resources, stunned the global AI industry with its strong performance and efficiency, turning DeepSeek from a little-known research team into China's best-known AI company almost overnight.
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Machine learning models can frequently produce systematic errors on critical subsets (or slices) of data that share common attributes. Discovering and explaining such model bugs is crucial for reliable model deployment. However, existing bug discovery and interpretation methods usually involve heavy human intervention and annotation, which can be cumbersome and have low bug coverage. In this paper, we propose HiBug, an automated framework for interpretable model debugging. Our approach utilizes large pre-trained models, such as chatGPT, to suggest human-understandable attributes that are related to the targeted computer vision tasks. By leveraging pre-trained vision-language models, we can efficiently identify common visual attributes of underperforming data slices using humanunderstandable terms. This enables us to uncover rare cases in the training data, identify spurious correlations in the model, and use the interpretable debug results to select or generate new training data for model improvement. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of the HiBug framework. Code is available at: https://github.com/cure-lab/HiBug.
China car giant BYD says it can thrive without US
The recent surge in fuel prices due to the war in Iran has spurred demand for electric vehicles around the world, and Chinese car makers are making the most of the opportunity. China is the world's top producer of EVs, and while its manufacturers remain largely shut out of the major car market of the United States, they are benefiting from an uptick in interest and orders via dealerships across Asia and elsewhere. BYD, which overtook Tesla as the world's largest seller of electric vehicles last year and is expanding aggressively overseas, is at the centre of this shift in focus. We survive and are successful without the US market today, BYD executive vice president Stella Li told the BBC at the Beijing Auto Show. Instead of aiming for US customers, the company says its challenge is meeting increased demand in other regions, including Brazil, the UK and Europe.
Graph Convolution Network based Recommender Systems: Learning Guarantee and Item Mixture Powered Strategy
Inspired by their powerful representation ability on graph-structured data, Graph Convolution Networks (GCNs) have been widely applied to recommender systems, and have shown superior performance. Despite their empirical success, there is a lack of theoretical explorations such as generalization properties. In this paper, we take a first step towards establishing a generalization guarantee for GCN-based recommendation models under inductive and transductive learning. We mainly investigate the roles of graph normalization and non-linear activation, providing some theoretical understanding, and construct extensive experiments to further verify these findings empirically. Furthermore, based on the proven generalization bound and the challenge of existing models in discrete data learning, we propose Item Mixture (IMix) to enhance recommendation. It models discrete spaces in a continuous manner by mixing the embeddings of positive-negative item pairs, and its effectiveness can be strictly guaranteed from empirical and theoretical aspects.
Non-convex Distributionally Robust Optimization: Non-asymptotic Analysis
Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) is a widely-used approach to learn models that are robust against distribution shift. Compared with the standard optimization setting, the objective function in DRO is more difficult to optimize, and most of the existing theoretical results make strong assumptions on the loss function.